Grievance Debate

International Nurses Day

Mr PICTON (Kaurna) (15:21): Thank you, Mr Speaker. Hopefully, the next one will be even quicker. I rise today to speak about International Nurses Day. This is something that we mark every year, and quite often in this parliament as well, particularly with the encouragement of the member for Hurtle Vale, who is a very strong advocate and leader for nurses in South Australia in this place. In my role as shadow minister for health, I want to give my thanks to every nurse in South Australia for the absolute dedication they show our state, for the care they have for our patients in hospitals, in the community, in primary care facilities, in aged-care facilities.

Nurses throughout the community are there to care for us. Nurses are there to support us through some of the best times and some of our worst times. Nurses will always be there. This is a small way in which every year we can say thank you to those nurses for what they do and never has it been more important than this year as we are confronting the worldwide coronavirus pandemic. Nurses themselves are the ones who are being put at risk around the world.

As we know, luckily in South Australia and across Australia, thanks to the great work of our public health workers and officials and also the people of South Australia and Australia, we have not faced what has been faced around the world. You can see around the world the impact that it is having on our front-line health workers, in particular nurses, who are sadly contracting coronavirus and many of whom are sadly dying from coronavirus. It is absolutely of the utmost importance that we do everything we possibly can to protect these workers from contracting coronavirus during the pandemic, that we make sure every possible piece of personal protective equipment (PPE) is available and every possible safeguard is available, and that we make sure that every support is there for these workers.

This morning I had the opportunity with the member for Hurtle Vale to have a virtual breakfast with a number of nurses from across South Australia who are very dedicated, who are very committed, and we were able to discuss some of the issues that they are facing on the front line as our state and our world face the coronavirus pandemic. Obviously, one of the risks is a lack of personal protective equipment (PPE) and we will continue to advocate to make sure that those front-line staff get all the protection they need so that they can be safe.

It is not just those issues that put nurses at risk. We know that there are significant security issues that nurses face. There are significant threats of violence that nurses face. This has been escalating over the past year or two and we have been consistently calling on the government to bring in protection for our nurses, like we have seen in other states, with additional security measures. Unfortunately, very little has been done by the government over those two years, but we will continue to advocate. When you look across country South Australia, we have very dedicated nurses across country South Australia, but there is no security there for them. There are no protection measures there for them and the government has been very slow to react to even their own review on those matters.

Sadly, they are facing issues of security of work as well. While we have gone through this pandemic, we have had hundreds of nurses who have lost shifts, who have lost hours and who have lost pay at our public hospitals. These are particularly nurses whom our system usually relies on as casual nurses to make sure that shifts work. Many of them are very experienced with over a decade's worth of experience, but they have been left at home with no support and no pay.

If they had worked at any other business they would get the JobKeeper allowance. Because they work for a public hospital and for the government, and the state government have not decided to help them, they have nothing and are being forced to Centrelink or forced to apply for other jobs in the community. That is not good enough. They need additional support.

One of the key things that should come out of this pandemic is an increased appreciation by all of the importance of keeping public health services in public hands. We do not want to see any more privatisation of public health services or nursing positions. We have just gone through the threat of SA Pathology being privatised. There are a number of very dedicated, hardworking nurses who work at SA Pathology and I would like to thank them. We do not want to see them privatised, nor do we want to see any other elements of our hospital or out-of-hospital services privatised, and we will continue to campaign for that. We are very glad the government has reversed its significant car parking price increases that impacted nurses. Thank you to all of those nurses for the enormous work that they do.